Announcing Updated Postman Plans and Pricing
blog.getpostman.comIf anyone is looking to switch, I've far preferred using Insomnia to Postman https://insomnia.rest/
As the creator of Insomnia, that makes me so happy to hear :)
I use Insomnia on a daily basis as does every engineer in my 5 man team. It's really incredible.
Thanks for your awesome work. Aside from upgrading from the free version, is there any other way to show support?
The best ways to help are to keep sharing it with others and participate on the open source repo
I'm not sure if accessibility is something you focused on or if you just got lucky but according to this thread I need to give insomnia a try since Postman is not concerned with making there software even marginally usable if your blind. https://github.com/postmanlabs/postman-app-support/issues/31...
It looks like e2ee data sync is a paid feature.
Does the free version come with no data sync at all or just not end to end encrypted?
Does Insomnia offer hosted documentation of the API collections? That's the feature which keeps me using Postman.
There's a nice community project that generates documentation that can be hosted https://github.com/jozsefsallai/insomnia-documenter
Not remotely the same, but we use Swagger on the test servers.
Thanks for your work! It's been a real help. I've been using it before Kong.
No problem! I'm so happy to have made such an impact on your day-to-day
We moved from postman to insomnia a year ago and have loved it due to its simplicity and ease of use. The ability to use the "environment" variables is amazingly flexible since you can use them in almost every text field.
I have to agree, I've been enjoying insomnia more, especially with the dark theme. I'm also glad the developer makes enough income on it. I also enjoy using Mockoon since it keeps a history of requests I make when I proxy it, very useful. I wish I knew a good proxying API tool that was a little more autonomous and feature full.
Charles Proxy has been pretty good to me - it's straightforward with little setup. It could use more features but it does exactly what it advertises.
I use it for security testing our website, making sure form data is properly handled, etc. It's also good for reverse engineering apis and can replace files with your own too.
Try Fiddler if you're on Windows.
Check out burp suite.
Does the recent Kong acquisition not concern you at all?
I'm looking to switch, but the ties to Kong make me nervous investing in the platform. Presumably because they might eventually make it always for-pay and/or focus on more enterprise-y features that I'm not interested in.
I would love to hear what others think.
The one thing I'll shine light on here is that open source has been a huge benefit to Insomnia thus far. It has allowed the community to drive decisions, submit feedback, and make the application much more robust. Kong was born from the same model for its core product so we no plans to change that. A thriving open source community is a huge advantage.
If you're curious, you can read more about the acquisition from my perspective on my blog: https://schier.co/blog/indie-to-acquisition
Thanks, Greg. I appreciate the candor, and I'll definitely take a look. It's great to hear that there are no plans to change how open the product is.
I switched to Insomnia because I was having a miserable time with Postman being able to resolve hostnames created as part of a Docker network on my local machine. There were a bunch of stack overflow and similar posts about how to configure it properly and nothing worked.
Insomnia didn't need any configuration at all, and the UI is so much less bloated and confusing
I use Insomnia too but wished it saved a history of my past requests. Other than that, it's actually much much faster than PostMan. I wonder if it's because it doesn't save my request history...
It does. Check the right side panel above the response. There’s a history icon (I think it may be next to the response time? Not at my computer.)
Oh wow. First time I found out about that. Then it's clear: Insomnia is 100X better than that bloated Postman!
You can view your history in the top right of the response pane
My team and I switched about a year ago now, haven't looked back. Postman was getting too bloated with features that tended towards a QA, or possibly even non-technical audience.
Thanks to gschier and the Insomnia team for simplifying my team's life.
Does insomnia allow you to set the mime types for each part of a multi-part request? That's one feature that Postman doesn't have that has irked me a bit.
Does Insomnia do server mock'ing, API documentation, or monitoring?
It doesn't seem to do all the things I am using Postman for.
Same! I’ve been happy with Insomnia!
Worth pointing out that postwoman is free and opensource. It is not quite as full-featured as postman, but for quick mocking without requiring registration, it is a great option. https://postwoman.io/
https://insomnia.rest/ is a pretty great alternative. The only thing you don't get for free is data syncing.
https://github.com/frigus02/RESTer is a Firefox (or Chrome) extension that does most of the same stuff that PostMan does without requiring a standalone client install.
https://postwoman.io/ is also great for simple use cases (and is MIT licensed https://github.com/liyasthomas/postwoman)
Seconded on Insomnia - I switched to it when encountering a bug in the encoding of the curl command generation in Postman, and haven't looked back.
Companies need to make money. People need to be paid good wages. I hate how people complain about paying for things that are useful for them. Most people expect things for free or very cheap and I blame the Apple App Store for that. Everyone expects their software to be free or $0.99 nowadays. Even $3.99 is considered too expensive. All this is doing is creating deflation in our industry. Software should be expensive. We don’t need unions, we need to change people’s expectations on how much software costs and not drive down prices to $0.
I agree with you. I subscribe to @Patio11's philosophy of "charge more".
But, I think there's a massive amount of opacity and sneakiness in SaaS pricing. If you read Postman's announcement post yesterday, you easily could've walked away expecting just a 50% price increase when in reality you may have been getting bumped from $8/user/mo. to $24/user/mo. because of the new rate limits.
Companies should charge more, but they should defend the merits of those decisions, not try to slip them under the rug.
Edit: also, I'm not sure your claim that software is getting less expensive holds up. I can say for sure that business software has significantly outpaced inflation in its price increases, but our research on this didn't cover consumer: https://capiche.com/e/software-inflation-rate
The problem products like Postman and others (Elastic et al) are having is one of "have your cake and eat it too".
For the past decade a number products rode the free software love boat, the gambit was to get organic community love and free marketing and hope that it somehow translates into VC endorsed financial rewards. This does not seem to be working out as expected.
Of course we should drive down prices to $0, that's practically the definition of progress. Our whole value proposition is the ability to offer more for less.
People should use Postman if the premium price is worth it to them over Insomnia, Postwoman, etc, not out of some sense of obligation. A business full of expensive developers is not a charity.
> Software should be expensive.
Why? Shouldn't the price of software be determined by the equilibrium of supply and demand? Or are you suggesting there's far more demand than supply?
It’s a hard realization for many that software will become like any other industry and that software jobs are just as at risk as others to automation and late stage capitalism.
You always think of yourself as the exception, until it comes for you.
Software developers should realize that as their salaries increase (and I'm not even talking about FAANG), companies that are selling SaaS and software solutions have to charge more in order to continue doing the fine work of developing stuff.
At the same time, investors are demanding that their portfolio companies begin to take profits after years of blasting away money in favor of growth-at-all-costs.
In my SaaS company, we have also increased prices and changed product packaging to generate greater profits in the past year. Customers hate it, but if they could see inside the company, they would see as I do that the changes are necessary to remain in business.
"...years of blasting away money in favor of growth-at-all-costs" - Maybe those companies should go under?
They should go under rather than just raise prices? Seems logical to try raising prices first.
Agreed, just funny how the commenter says they're blasting away money for years in one sentence but then seems to try and justify the price increase in the next.
"Customers hate it, but" <-- remember that for the company post mortem.
No one is complaining that Postman isn't free for business. Take another look at the article. In summation: "So, for more money, you get fewer users, API calls, documentation views, custom domains, and integrations."
> I hate how people complain about paying for things that are useful for them. . Software should be expensive. We don’t need unions, we need to change people’s expectations on how much software costs and not drive down prices to $0.
Hard disagree with absolutely all of this.
All people need unions, literally every human on earth deserves a union. If you work for anyone, anywhere, doing anything, you deserve a union. Any employee without a union is in an inherently unfair position, and is being taken advantage of.
Software should be cheap. Software should be as low cost as possible, without committing some sort of evil (sacrificing quality or working conditions or polluting, etc).
And a major goal of all humanity should be to drive the cost of all things as close to $0 as possible, without hurting anyone or doing anything unethical. We should be intentionally aiming for zero scarcity in all things, that's what progress is.
Making software some sort of expensive luxury that only certain people can afford is terrible, and that logic being applied to everything (from housing, to education, to healthcare and more) is the biggest problem in society today.
I mostly agree and wrote a similar sibling comment. However, I'm still trying to grasp your comments regarding unions.
Would that mean that nobody can have individual salary negotiations? Your colleagues can vote that you have to strike? Are VPs and Directors in the same union with line level employees, or what are the "sides"?
I've never worked in a union environment, so this might be an unintentional caricature.
Software doesn't have to be written by companies - see: GNU/Linux, vim, Python, VLC, Jitsi... and the list could continue for a long time.
People do have non-financial motivations for developing software (accessibility improvements, creating community value, solving their own personal challenges or problems).
If you think this trend is going to change, I'd suspect (but can't guarantee of course) that you might be mistaken. Costs are going to continue to reduce, and software is going to continue to be easier to build, distribute and replicate; meanwhile new generations of developers will continue to expand the pool of participants in our software communities.
There are huge parts of the world now coming online which will simply not want (or be able) to pay the kind of salaries or fees that enterprises and software developers have been accustomed to receiving for their services.
Is it unreasonable to expect good software for low cost (or even free) if we have ample people, motivation, and ability to produce it, and if we enjoy a worldwide net benefit from it as a result?
The way I'd rephrase the situation is: how are investors and enterprise incumbents going to adjust if this trend continues, and what's a good way to ensure that as an individual you can participate and thrive in a world if this continues to happen.
A hint/suggestion from my biased opinion is that social safety nets are important, and nations that provide those for their communities will free up developers and resources to build the software and services that everyone really needs, rather than having developers spend their time on (yes high-paid, yes comfortable -- but broadly beneficial towards executives-and-investor class rather than community or nation) work.
The belief that software should be free long precedes any app stores ("I paid $N for the computer, why should I have to pay for the software‽‽‽"). It's especially weird to peg the blame on the Apple App Store given that it has managed to get people to spend billions on flippant stuff they would never have paid a penny for.
In the pre-app store days it was incredibly difficult to make a business selling software if you weren't one of the very large players.
Having said that, to address-
"Companies need to make money. People need to be paid good wages"
-this would be fair retort if it was a new service charging {X}. If it isn't, the counter-argument is that they were undercharging to prevent competitors from making money / paying good wages.
I'm neither here nor there on this, but it certainly isn't a moral thing that you're holding it as. People are annoyed that they're going to have to pay more for less. Eh.
I mean you’re right, companies need to make money, but it’s not the users fault. The play postman made (and a lot of other companies) was that they could make up for low profit margins with high/increasing user growth indefinitely. That’s how you get high valuations with low current profit. When companies have to quickly & drastically make large pricing changes, they’re implicitly telling you that the state of affairs at that company is that they need to make money now on current users.
Companies have obligations to build real businesses & products that are based on realistic & solid plans from day 1. And they need to adjust those plans when things change, but by building a real company from day 1, those changes should be realistic and measured.
Postman is a good tool that I've used for many years. It's currently open on my desktop. However I would never pay for their team collaboration features and I doubt I would pay much for the desktop client if they started charging for it. There are too many bizarre UI choices, too many missing features, and it's much too difficult to maintain scripted tests in their awful JSON based "collection" format. The good news is that they have lots of room for improvement and it's quite a bit better than some of the older alternatives like the absurdly awful SoapUI / ReadyAPI line of products.
There's also PostWoman for free (no affiliation):
I feel that we need a new app called postperson :)
postdude :)
postthey? :) as per [1].
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/word-of-the-ye...
postbro
Post-humanism is a thing.
*Free and Open Source (MIT license)
I'm surprised nobody mentioned https://paw.cloud. It's a Postman alternative that's native (no Electron/Javascript garbage) with a simple one-time-purchase pricing model.
Doesn't seem like it supports Windows, so in many people's case (including mine) not a viable alternative. Otherwise looks like a great product.
I don't know any dev on a Windows setup, it's either Linux or MacOS. So this is a very serious question and I even up voted you out of interest. Do you own the admin rights to your dev work setup?
Some people in the Python community were recently looking into this very thing... and the results were surprising.
From https://talkpython.fm/episodes/show/243/python-on-windows-is...
"over 50% of all developers programming in Python do so on Windows."
Maybe the researcher is right, maybe they aren't. There is no solid way to tell. But there are a lot of developers out there in big, old school corporate environments. All running Windows.
Windows, C#, formerly Visual Studio, now Rider. Of course with admin rights. Do you realize .NET is pretty big in the business world, long before it even became cross platform with netcore or there being a crossplatform IDE?
What are the main benefits? Have you tried using it for WPF? Unfortunately I let my test license expire before I could test much, but remember that it felt a lot less awful than Visual Studio.
No WPF, no. Main benefits: Features of ReSharper without the speed tax of ReSharper ;)
Yeah, own the admin rights and all. With features like first-class linux kernels [1] and modern terminals [2], Windows is becoming more and more a first-class, developer-friendly OS.
[1] - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/about
[2] - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/introducing-windo...
I know of (and have done) development windows before. Especially with WSL and docker, things like a django application aren't _too_ problematic once you get around some of the quirks.
It's not perfect but it does work for a lot of web app development. You still have VSCode/Intellij, etc. Not to mention all those who develop windows applications.
I recently switched to Windows w/WSL after ~9 years on OSX, and ~7 years before that on Linux.
It's been challenging in some regards, but it mostly just works. It's also been a breath of fresh air. I've found paying the Apple tax just not worth it anymore (riddled with bugs and paying a lot more for the same level of hardware).
Note: I have admin rights.
Sounds like you don't know a diverse set of devs. Mac/Linux may be the hot stuff for people you see at bootcamps and conferences, but there are tons of devs whose primary dev box is Windows.
I've got both a Mac Pro and a beefy PC at my desk but 99% of my time is spent on the PC. And yes, I do have admin rights over my setup.
There is an easy explanation: Look into big (and maybe boring) companies&cooperations who are not this SF Silicon Valley shiny unicorns. They are mostly forced to use Windows on their desk without any alternative except maybe their servers.
Witnessed this myself in a lot of companies... they will never change.
I work on WPF apps on Windows (it's pretty frustrating).
what major frustrations do you face in WPF? thanks in advance.
Paw is amazing indeed. The pricing model + the fact that it's native!
+1 Paw
The submitted title was "Postman announces 50% price hike starting Feb 2020". That information isn't in the article, so it would be better to post it as a comment in the thread, rather than putting it in the title. That would also allow for supplying more context, such as what the price was before.
I started using Insomnia a few months ago and it's been such a pleasure to use. I find it more user friendly and less "in your face" than Postman. Everything just seemed to work the as expected.
I've been using it, and it works for my needs. Supports the various authentication protocols, and allows you to save calls in tabs.
I find it much more usable as well.
Works as well with GraphQL support added https://postwoman.io/. Also, https://insomnia.rest/ is great
Also for automated testing in APIs https://dredd.org/en/latest/
Both open-sourced. I will say one of the best things about Postman was the Proxy support, but either way doesn't works with the iPhone and other stuff.
The entire concept of that postwoman thing is utterly broken. Have they never heard of cross origin restrictions?
Yes, they have heard about cross origin restrictions. Postwoman gets around them by having an (optional) proxy that actually makes the request on the users behalf.
Whether or not you think this is a good idea is another matter, but it works.
(Cross-posted from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22012831)
I don't know anything about Postman, but this is an interesting case study on price increases. No one likes price increases, but they happen. So long as you have a strong ROI use case, you can navigate those discussions with your customers. E.g., "You were getting a 50x return, but listen, we're running a business over here, and a 45x return is still pretty darn good."
The challenge in Postman's case appears to be that they ALSO reduced the bundle components. So you compound the perception from "paying more" to "paying more but getting less". That's worse optics.
What I'd offer you think about is this may be a perfectly rational and even optimal customer solution. It's unifying two different pricing actions: price increase and product bundling. The logic being that many customers weren't using all the users, API calls, documentation views, custom domains, and integrations that were previously included in, say, the Pro bundle.
So as opposed to increasing price by—I'm making up numbers here—12% and leaving bundle elements the same, they increased price by 10% and cut features by 2%. The end result is exactly the same, but is actually better for most customers because they will get the same level of features they needed and not have to pay that additional 2% for features they weren't using anyway.
Note that the alternative here would be to just increase price by the full 12% and change nothing else. Then later you can cut features and price by 2%, which people won't react to because "paying less for less" is perfectly logical. Then those minority of customers who actually needed the 2% incremental features could buy them ad-hoc, and end up paying the same price.
Albeit, this means that you now don't have pretty bundles, and are selling features à la carte, which can be hard to manage. OR you make all those customers upgrade to Enterprise, which they'll be pissed about, but still falls into the logical "paying more for more" optics.
For a more full feature set product there is APIMolder:
https://codesolvent.com/api-molder/
You get a mock server OOTB.
I work with lot of APIS (our team owns atleast 30 of them) switching between different environments and have found Paw (https://paw.cloud/) more productive than postman.
It puts me off that its $6 more a month than Github team, and I felt it was steep before. We are heavy postman users, and have been from the start. We will consider different options now.
> Existing customers using the free version of Postman can lock in 2019 rates by upgrading to the existing Postman Pro annual plan or Postman Enterprise before February 1, 2020.
So if I understand that right, there will be no free plan from 1st of Feb going forward. Or do others read that differently?
I should probably start looking for alternatives and saving my API documentations from Postman somewhat better.
They have confirmed the free version is sticking around the same as today. They are just telling people who are considering upgrading to the paid version that if you do it right away you can lock in the old rates for 1 year.
One reason I use Postman is to check latency from all around the world.
Surely you could probably setup a ton of ec2 or gcp instances and try that out, but at least for me, Postman easily allowed me to do that (and might still stick with them even with the price hike).
If anyone does have any suggestions, that'd be great as well.
Shout out to postwoman, https://github.com/liyasthomas/postwoman which is a FOSS clone. No sync-ing yet but it's on my to do to add in basic collection sync support.
I mean, those prices are still not massive if your team is using Postman a lot. I don't think they won't lose much business over this move and overall it's understandable when you look at the expansion of the software and the probably much bigger team behind it.
Makes me consider the other options now. It use to be best for the dollar.
Curl is free man.
I enjoy testing HTTP endpoints by bit-banging an ethernet cable so that I don't have to buy a computer.
In all seriousness - Regardless of the solution Postman/Postwomen/Insomnia/Paw/etc - People use these tools so they can easily manipulate any part of their query, without needing to lookup curl flags and nuances.
Serious question: How do you construct complex curl requests? Do you do it all on the command line? Or you do it in a text editor? If you want to change the field of a form for your post request, how quickly can you change it? Curl is a great tool, but for sandbox-like usage it's just too clunky of a UX IMO.
It's all REST these days, sometimes with JSON payloads. Nothing too hard to mangle together.
I'm not defending them in the least (see my post on yesterday's discussion) but Postman isn't just a UI over curl.
The primary value add is the ability to organize groups of related requests and then run them as part of a test suite and assert against the outcomes. It's essentially a test tool for REST APIs that's accessible to a less technical audience.
Exactly my thoughts. Free and not that hard to use. I guess $96/yr is a good trade off for some UI?
Full feature set alternative, APIMolder:
https://codesolvent.com/api-molder/
Mock server OOTB and a bunch of other goodies.
It would be great for a competitive app that commits you're collection in your version control.
Syncing collections is a solved problem that postman resolved so they could charge for it.
For the emacs users out there: restclient.el is pretty amazing. There is a similar library for vscode with the same name.
$360/year per developer, to manage manual HTTP request testing locally. Sure.
Switched to Insomnia and never look back.
An I the only one using Fiddler?
Good for them if their customer base is so strong that they can do this.
Why not just use curl?
No really, I'm curious. What does a tool like this offer over curl?
GUI, remembering / grouping your requests, saving / syncing your requests to the cloud / etc.
It can generate curl command lines too.
If your team is using solely Mac, it's now more expensive than using [Paw](1).
(1): https://paw.cloud/
Exactly this.
I don't see why I should be billed annually for using a managed HTTP client. Given that, Paw sounds better equipped for my personal API development needs all for a one time payment.
I really like Paw. The interface is much cleaner than Postman. Postman has more group sharing features, but otherwise, Paw matches Postman's other features pretty well.
I do too. It's in my toolbox of "things I rarely use, but when I need it, it's my favorite thing in the world".
Paw’s fantastic, and a great example of a native Mac app.
I’d really like to see something similar in Windows.